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Will the Gawker Story Change the Shame? Pastor Suffers Gay Hate the Most; You Can’t Be Fired For Being Gay

Will the Gawker Story Change the Shame?

Mostly everyone has heard about a story Gawker ran about a married “straight” exec with ties to the Obama administration and the exec allegedly looking for sex from a gay pornster for hire. The pornster allegedly wanted something from the exec and it all devolves from there. Gawker has received huge backlash for publishing the piece, enough to remove the article. Of course that’s been truncated and it goes much deeper.

Gawker nevertheless reported that Geithner planned to go to Chicago to meet a gay porn star and escort, and was prepared to pay $2,500 for the encounter. David Geithner reportedly cancelled the meet-up after the escort tried to get him to use his political connections to help with a housing dispute. Previously, the anonymous escort had asked Republican Sen. Ted Cruz’s office for help with his housing dispute, the online article said.

And then there’s this:

Readers pointed out that publicizing Geithner’s possible sexual orientation did nothing for the public good: he’s not a public official or political candidate who has advocated against gay rights, for instance.

“This guy is not an antigay politician whose hypocrisy needs to be outed. Why would anyone care if he wants to hire an escort?” wrote reader Mike Johnson of Los Angeles on Gawker’s Facebook page.

I wouldn’t have published anything like this. I believe coming out is personal and private. But I can’t help thinking about the shame that’s still involved with being gay. That’s all. I’m not taking this to another level. I’m only talking about the shame right now. If this guy had allegedly tried to hire a female sex worker would all these people be up in arms on twitter about that?

It reminds me of the old Hollywood days when every single topic was safe to report on except one…don’t tell anyone that the star is gay. Think Rock Hudson. Hell, think J. Edgar Hoover. And that’s not the way it should work anymore. I don’t mean we should start outing people. But the shame shouldn’t be there.

A brilliant gay man literally saved a church from going under, but when they discovered he married a man he was let go. Think about that. Here’s a brave gay man who isn’t hiding anything, he isn’t hiring male whores, he isn’t worth millions of dollars, and he now can’t work at what he loves doing anymore because he’s gay. That’s the kind of guy we should all be tweeting and supporting.

Thankfully, people are speaking up for him, which I’ve noticed has been a trend lately.

When it was discovered that Hutchinson had married his male partner, church officials told him he was “unfit” to lead the congregation. He was fired the same day.

Now that same congregation — the one he built — is speaking out in Hutchinson’s defense.“This church was dying when he came here, they weren’t far from closing the doors. It was real close. He came in, worked on it, got people to come…He brought life back into that church,” said Kevin Hershberger, a church member.

I can’t tell you much, but I can tell you this. This guy has nothing at all to be ashamed about.

You Can’t Be Fired For Being Gay

This almost sounds too good to be true. I don’t know enough about it to comment in depth because, oddly, it didn’t seem to filter into any of my news feeds today. I find that disturbing…that I read all kinds of other articles that weren’t nearly as important as this one is.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, created to enforce and implement the 1964 Civil Rights Act, ruled this week that workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation is illegal.

The ruling states that employers who discriminate against LGBT workers are violating Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employment discrimination “based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin.”

It’s a new interpretation of the law with wide-reaching potential.

In the past, courts have ruled that Title VII doesn’t apply to sexual orientation because it isn’t explicitly mentioned, but the new interpretation accounts for LGBT discrimination under the umbrella of sex discrimination.

“Sexual orientation discrimination is sex discrimination because it necessarily entails treating an employee less favorably because of the employee’s sex,” the EEOC concluded.

Ryan Field is the author of over 100 published works of LGBT fiction, the best selling Virgin Billionaire series, a pg rated hetero romance that was featured on The Home Shopping Network titled, "Loving Daylight," and a few more works of full length fiction with a pen name. He's worked in publishing for twenty years as a writer, editor, and associate editor. His work has been in Lambda Award winning anthologies and he's self-published a few novels with Ryan Field Press. You can reach him by leaving a comment here, or at rfieldj@aol.com